LEGITIMACY

LEGITIMACY

LEGITIMACY

English 1010-68 Essay #2: Narrating Others Mariel Smith Texts Said, “States” (online resource). A media or social media text of your choice. Goals By closely engaging with one in-class text and an additional text of your choosing, you will develop an essay that advances a claim about how and why textual and visual representations of the world offer or deny legitimacy. This project will be built on sustained examination of textual and visual evidence. Option 1: Begin by looking at a specific visual or textual representation of people in the news, and consider the ways that representation offers, denies, or constructs conditions of legitimacy for them as individuals, communities, or states. Who gets to be a legitimate member ofthe community, how do we know this, and why? How and why is legitimacy, statehood, or inclusion denied? Use Said’s essay as a lens to develop a specific argument about the process of legitimization at work in the text that you have chosen. Explore one or more of his pairs of terms —presence and absence, mobility and insecurity, dislocation and location, statelessness and exile —as a way of considering what is lost and what is gained in our textual representations of one another. Option 2: The medium of each text we’ve considered in class is different—one employs photographs, while another involves sequenced panels, while yet another uses only text—but all three texts represent the self and others in specific ways. How does the question of legitimacy and others change when the form of representation changes? Consider how the framing of text with images affects our perception of legitimacy and identity. Why and how does Said use photographs in his essay, and what is lost and what is gained through those choices? What formal or generic choices does your selected outside text make, and what are the implications of those choices on the way legitimacy is communicated or represented? Evaluation I will evaluate essays by considering the success of your sustained engagement with textual and visual evidence and how this work builds toward and develops your specific argument about the ways representations mediate our understanding of others. Successful projects will be built around three primary contributions: your specific observations about Said’s essay and your other text the implications of those observations as regards how we read your selected text and what it communicates to us and an explicit articulation of what this means in terms to your readers’ understanding of how visual and textual representations narrate what we know or imagine of others’ identities. Length: 6-7 pages (1,800-2,100 words), double-spaced. Due dates Rough draft (5+ pages)